• Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2023
CARTONI acquires STE-MAN/Manios Digital & Film
Elisabetta Cartoni (l) of Cartoni , and Steve Manios of STE-MAN/Manios Digital & Film
NORTH HOLLYWOOD, Calif. -- 

Cartoni, the Rome-based designer and manufacturer of professional camera support products for the film, television, and broadcast industries, has acquired STE-MAN Inc/Manios Digital & Film, the North Hollywood-based supplier of premium camera equipment. Manios Digital & Film has represented Cartoni products across the United States since 1989.

The move broadens Cartoni’s sales reach and enables the company to personally serve its diverse client base in the U.S. “In acquiring our U.S. distributor, we will be more directly involved with our number one market and improve our response to the industry’s evolving needs,” said Elisabetta Cartoni, president and CEO. “The close cooperation we’ve had with Steve Manios, and his great team will continue for many more years. This merger will also allow us to further expand and better serve the rest of the Americas with a dedicated warehouse and service center.” 

Manios assumes the position of VP of sales and marketing. “This is the natural step in a wonderful relationship spanning more than three decades,” Manios said. “I’m looking forward to working closely with the Cartoni team in Italy and growing markets for their unique products.” Other senior members of the Manios Digital & Film staff will continue in their current roles, including Western regional sales manager David Butler, Eastern regional sales manager Gus Harilaou, inside sales manager Chris Lobos and accounting director Selma Top.

Manios Digital & Film has launched and marketed Cartoni’s most popular and innovative tools in the U.S.  Cartoni’s diverse range of fluid heads, tripods, pedestals and accessories are used worldwide by leading cinematographers, camera operators and television cameramen. Founded in 1935, it is a support company that designs, manufactures and assembles its products in Europe. The company owns over three dozen patents for its fluid action and counterbalance technology. Cartoni innovation has received international recognition, including a Scientific and Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1992 for the technology behind the company’s fluid heads, and two Society of Operating Cameramen (SOC) Technical Awards for the invention of the first Fluid Modular Camera Control Head System in 1999 and, in 2016, for outstanding contributions to cinematography through the design and development of the Lambda Head.

  • Monday, Feb. 27, 2023
AI learns to outsmart humans in video games--and real life
This image released by Sony Interactive Entertainment shows a scene from the video game Gran Turismo Sophy. Grand Turismo players have been competing against computer-driven race cars since the franchise launched in the 1990s, but the new AI driver that was unleashed last week on Grand Turismo 7 is smarter and faster because it's been trained using the latest AI methods. (Sony Interactive Entertainment via AP)

Speed around a French village in the video game Gran Turismo and you might spot a Corvette behind you trying to catch your slipstream.

The technique of using the draft of an opponent's racecar to speed up and overtake them is one favored by skilled players of PlayStation's realistic racing game.

But this Corvette driver is not being controlled by a human — it's GT Sophy, a powerful artificial intelligence agent built by PlayStation-maker Sony.

Gran Turismo players have been competing against computer-generated racecars since the franchise launched in the 1990s, but the new AI driver that was unleashed last week on Gran Turismo 7 is smarter and faster because it's been trained using the latest AI methods.

"Gran Turismo had a built-in AI existing from the beginning of the game, but it has a very narrow band of performance and it isn't very good," said Michael Spranger, chief operating officer of Sony AI. "It's very predictable. Once you get past a certain level, it doesn't really entice you anymore."

But now, he said, "this AI is going to put up a fight."

Visit an artificial intelligence laboratory at universities and companies like Sony, Google, Meta, Microsoft and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and it's not unusual to find AI agents like Sophy racing cars, slinging angry birds at pigs, fighting epic interstellar battles or helping human gamers build new Minecraft worlds -- all part of the job description for computer systems trying to learn how to get smarter in games.

But in some instances, they are also trying to learn how to get smarter in the real world. In a January paper, a University of Cambridge researcher who built an AI agent to control Pokémon characters argued it could "inspire all sorts of applications that require team management under conditions of extreme uncertainty, including managing a team of doctors, robots or employees in an ever-changing environment, like a pandemic-stricken region or a war zone."

And while that might sound like a kid making a case for playing three more hours of Pokémon Violet, the study of games has been used to advance AI research — and train computers to solve complex problems — since the mid-20th century.

Initially, AI was used on games like checkers and chess to test at winning strategy games. Now a new branch of research is more focused on performing open-ended tasks in complex worlds and interacting with humans, not just for the purpose of beating them.

"Reality is like a super-complicated game," said Nicholas Sarantinos, who authored the Pokémon paper and recently turned down a doctoral offer at Oxford University to start an AI company aiming to help corporate workplaces set up more collaborative teams.

In the web-based Pokémon Showdown battle simulator, Sarantinos developed an algorithm to analyze a team of six Pokémon — predicting how they would perform based on all the possible battle scenarios ahead of them and their comparative strengths and weaknesses.

Microsoft, which owns the popular Minecraft game franchise as well as the Xbox game system, has tasked AI agents with a variety of activities — from steering clear of lava to chopping trees and making furnaces. Researchers hope some of their learnings could eventually play a role in real-world technology, such as how to get a home robot to take on certain chores without having to program it to do so.

While it "goes without stating" that real humans behave quite differently from fictional video game creatures, "the core ideas can still be used," Sarantinos said. "If you use psychology tests, you can take this information to conclude how well they can work together."

Amy Hoover, an assistant professor of informatics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who's built algorithms for the digital card game Hearthstone, said "there really is a reason for studying games" but it is not always easy to explain.

"People aren't always understanding that the point is about the optimization method rather than the game," she said.

Games also offer a useful testbed for AI — including for some real-world applications in robotics or health care — that's safer to try in a virtual world, said Vanessa Volz, an AI researcher at the Danish startup Modl.ai, which builds AI systems for game development.

But, she adds, "it can get overhyped."

"It's probably not going to be one big breakthrough and that everything is going to be shifted to the real world," Volz said.

Japanese electronics giant Sony launched its own AI research division in 2020 with entertainment in mind, but it's nonetheless attracted broader academic attention. Its research paper introducing Sophy last year made it on the cover of the prestigious science journal Nature, which said it could potentially have effects on other applications such as drones and self-driving vehicles.

The technology behind Sophy is based on an algorithmic method known as reinforcement learning, which trains the system by rewarding it when it gets something right as it runs virtual races thousands of times.

"The reward is going to tell you that, 'You're making progress. This is good,' or, 'You're off the track. Well, that's not good,'" Spranger said.

The world's best Gran Turismo players are still finishing ahead of Sophy at tournaments, but average players will find it hard to beat — and can adjust difficulty settings depending on how much they want to be challenged.

PlayStation players will only get to try racing against Sophy until March 31, on a limited number of circuits, so it can get some feedback and go back into testing. Peter Wurman, director of Sony AI America and project lead on GT Sophy, said it takes about two weeks for AI agents to train on 20 PlayStations.

"To get it spread throughout the whole game, it takes some more breakthroughs and some more time before we're ready for that," he said.

And to get it onto real streets or Formula One tracks? That could take a lot longer.

Self-driving car companies adopt similar machine-learning techniques, but "they don't hand over complete control of the car the way we are able to," Wurman said. "In a simulated world, there's nobody's life at risk. You know exactly the kinds of things you're going to see in the environment. There's no people crossing the road or anything like that."

Matt O'Brien is an AP technology writer

  • Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023
Autodesk releases Moxion Rooms for cloud-based production review
Moxion Rooms
SAN FRANCISCO -- 

Autodesk has introduced Moxion Rooms, a forensically secure review solution enabling creative teams in production and postproduction to share live streams and review uploaded assets in a single cloud-based environment. 

The solution was developed for the specifications and production needs of remote teams working on the Amazon Originals series The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, and is now being released commercially to boost collaboration and productivity for all studios.  

“Moxion Rooms accommodates collaborative review in a secure environment with video and voice chat, and elegantly hosts and stores everything anyone working on a production needs to access, from budgets to scripts and schedules,” said Ron Ames, producer/founder, The Modern Film Consortium. “This was essential for a project like Rings of Power with so many moving parts.” 

“We acquired Moxion to accelerate our move to production in the cloud, and we’re excited to introduce Moxion Rooms to support next-generation creative needs,” said Diana Colella, SVP, Autodesk Media & Entertainment. “Teams can now collaborate on footage and assets virtually as it is captured, and facilitate fully synced live review sessions via a browser. This ultimately enables faster content delivery and helps keep up with industry demand.”    

The cloud-based Moxion platform supports secure digital dailies and camera to cloud (Immediates) workflows. With Moxion Rooms people can collaborate and review camera footage on set and remotely with the efficiency and immediacy required to make creative decisions during principal photography in 4K high dynamic range (HDR) quality, with studio-grade security. Moxion Rooms includes powerful review tools, video and voice chat, and industry-standard support for Dolby Vision, HDR10 and SDR.

Accolades for Autodesk Moxion include an Engineering Excellence Award from the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA), a Workflow Systems Medal from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), and a Lumiere Award from the Advanced Imaging Society. Moxion supports complex and challenging productions, including The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, The Midnight Sky, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and The Matrix Resurrections.

 

  • Friday, Feb. 17, 2023
Simu Liu to host Motion Picture Academy's Scientific and Technical Awards
Simu Liu
LOS ANGELES -- 

Actor Simu Liu will host the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Scientific and Technical Awards presentation on Friday, February 24, at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. He will present nine awards, including an Oscar® statuette, to 20 individual award recipients during the evening. 

Liu made history as the star of “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” the first Marvel movie to center on an Asian lead character.  His previous credits include the television series “Kim’s Convenience.”  His upcoming projects include “Barbie,” with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.

Achievements receiving Academy Scientific and Technical Awards need not to have been developed and introduced during a specified period of time. Rather, the achievements must demonstrate a proven record of contributing significant value to the scientific and technical processes of making motion pictures.

The 95th Oscars® will be held on Sunday, March 12, at the Dolby® Theatre at Ovation Hollywood and will be televised live on ABC and in more than 200 territories worldwide.

  • Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2023
Google hopes "Bard" will outsmart ChatGPT, Microsoft in AI
A sign is shown on a Google building at their campus in Mountain View, Calif., Sept. 24, 2019. Google is girding for a battle of wits in artificial intelligence with “Bard," a conversational service apparently aimed at countering the popularity of the ChatGPT tool backed by Microsoft. Bard initially will be available exclusively to a group of “trusted testers" before being widely released later in the year, according to a Monday, Feb. 6, 2023, blog post from Google CEO Sundar Pichai. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

Google is girding for a battle of wits in the field of artificial intelligence with "Bard," a conversational service apparently aimed at countering the popularity of the ChatGPT tool backed by Microsoft.

Bard initially will be available exclusively to a group of "trusted testers" before being widely released later this year, according to a Monday blog post from Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Google's chatbot is supposed to be able to explain complex subjects such as outer space discoveries in terms simple enough for a child to understand. It also claims the service will also perform other more mundane tasks, such as providing tips for planning a party, or lunch ideas based on what food is left in a refrigerator. Pichai didn't say in his post whether Bard will be able to write prose in the vein of William Shakespeare, the playwright who apparently inspired the service's name.

"Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity," Pichai wrote

Google announced Bard's existence less than two weeks after Microsoft disclosed it's pouring billions of dollars into OpenAI, the San Francisco-based maker of ChatGPT and other tools that can write readable text and generate new images.

Microsoft's decision to up the ante on a $1 billion investment that it previously made in OpenAI in 2019 intensified the pressure on Google to demonstrate that it will be able to keep pace in a field of technology that many analysts believe will be as transformational as personal computers, the internet and smartphones have been in various stages over the past 40 years.

In a report last week, CNBC said a team of Google engineers working on artificial intelligence technology "has been asked to prioritize working on a response to ChatGPT." Bard had been a service being developed under a project called "Atlas," as part of Google's "code red" effort to counter the success of ChatGPT, which has attracted tens of millions of users since its general release late last year, while also raising concerns in schools about its ability to write entire essays for students.

Pichai has been emphasizing the importance of artificial intelligence for the past six years, with one of the most visible byproducts materializing in 2021 as part of a system called "Language Model for Dialogue Applications," or LaMDA, which will be used to power Bard.

Google also plans to begin incorporating LaMDA and other artificial intelligence advancements into its dominant search engine to provide more helpful answers to the increasingly complicated questions being posed by its billion of users. Without providing a specific timeline, Pichai indicated the artificial intelligence tools will be deployed in Google's search in the near future.

In another sign of Google's deepening commitment to the field, Google announced last week that it is investing in and partnering with Anthropic, an AI startup led by some former leaders at OpenAI. Anthropic has also built its own AI chatbot named Claude and has a mission centered on AI safety.

Michael Liedtke is an AP technology writer

  • Thursday, Feb. 2, 2023
Motion Picture Academy to honor 8 scientific and technical achievements
The Motion Picture Academy’s Scientific and Technical Awards ceremony in 2016.
LOS ANGELES -- 

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will honor eight scientific and technical achievements represented by 19 individual award recipients at its annual Scientific and Technical Awards presentation on Friday, February 24, at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, marking its return to an in-person event for the first time since 2019. 

In addition, Iain Neil will receive the Gordon E. Sawyer Award (an Oscar® statuette) for his extraordinary technological contributions that have brought credit to the industry.

“Since 1931, the Academy has recognized the most important innovations in filmmaking; inventors and engineers have been advancing the art and science of motion pictures ever since,” said Barbara Ford Grant, chair of the Scientific and Technical Awards Committee.  “Their efforts have not only served to enrich the art form but inspire a global industry to engineer, create, change, and push the boundaries of our craft.  This year we honor achievements spanning accomplishments from pioneering methods in practical rain effects to career-long contributions in optical design for cinematography to humanistic-driven AI techniques.  This outstanding work has enabled new and exciting ways of creating and further expanding how we experience motion pictures.”

Unlike other Academy Awards® to be presented this year, achievements receiving Scientific and Technical Awards need not have been developed and introduced during a specified period of time.  Rather, the achievements must demonstrate a proven record of contributing significant value to the process of making motion pictures. 

The Academy Awards for scientific and technical achievements are: 
 

TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS (ACADEMY CERTIFICATES)
To Howard Jensen and Danny Cangemi 
for the concept and creation, and to John Frazier for the development of the 60- and 100-foot Rain Bars.

The Rain Bars provide a portable system for the creation of realistic, large-scale, adjustable, practical rain for motion pictures. Their rapid setup and relocation capabilities enable the efficient production of effects ranging from misting drizzles to torrential downpours.

To Mark Hills and Jim Vanns for the design and engineering of the FQ render farm management system.

FQ’s highly efficient scheduler and sophisticated prioritization algorithms reflect a deep understanding of render farm management. With an architecture that has remained largely unchanged for more than a decade, FQ continues to support substantial growth in computational complexity at Framestore.

To Matt Chambers for his contributions to modern render farm management system design as exemplified in the scheduling architectures of Cue3 and Plow.

These design contributions have resulted in robust, versatile, extensible and highly scalable render farm management systems that have supported substantial growth in computational complexity at Sony Pictures Imageworks and Weta Digital.

To Sébastien Deguy and Christophe Soum for the concept and original implementation of Substance Engine, and to Sylvain Paris and Nicolas Wirrmann for the design and engineering of Substance Designer.

Adobe Substance 3D Designer provides artists with a flexible and efficient procedural workflow for designing complex textures. Its sophisticated and art-directable pattern generators, intuitive design, and renderer-agnostic architecture have led to widespread adoption in motion picture visual effects and animation.

To David Eberle, Theodore Kim, Fernando de Goes and Audrey Wong for the design and development of the Fizt2 elastic simulation system.

Fizt2 provides a high-performance solver with novel and stable implicit physics and robust collision detection. The design of this system enables artist workflows to easily apply soft-body dynamics to a broad range of interacting animated characters and objects.

SCIENTIFIC AND ENGINEERING AWARDS (ACADEMY PLAQUES)
To Larry Barton for the pioneering design, development and engineering, and to Ben Wilcox for the electronic engineering and software development, of the Cinematography Electronics CineTape. 

The CineTape distance measurement system provides focus-pullers with continuous, accurate, real-time distance information to the subject, either at the camera or remotely. This high resolution distance data has enabled the reliable execution of shots that previously were impossible to judge accurately or had required multiple takes to achieve.

To Howard Preston for the concept, design and engineering, and to Bernie Butler-Smith for the design and implementation of electronic circuitry and software, of the Preston Cinema Systems Light Ranger 2.

The Light Ranger 2 provides precise real-time focus distance information by continuously tracking subjects in sixteen discrete zones. The distance and depth of field indicators are superimposed on the camera image, enabling the focus-puller to intuitively judge focus, even in formerly impossible and extremely challenging situations.

AWARD OF COMMENDATION (SPECIAL PLAQUE)
To Ryan Laney for his innovative adaptation and deployment of AI-driven facial veiling technology used to protect the identities while preserving the visual relatability of subjects in documentary filmmaking as exemplified in Welcome to Chechnya (2020).

GORDON E. SAWYER AWARD (OSCAR STATUETTE)
To Iain Neil for his substantial, extensive and innovative lens designs which have had lasting impact in motion picture cinematography.

The 95th Oscars® will be held on Sunday, March 12, 2023, at the Dolby® Theatre at Ovation Hollywood and will be televised live on ABC and in more than 200 territories worldwide.

  • Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023
Google has the next move as Microsoft embraces OpenAI buzz
Zoubin Ghahramani, vice president of research at Google, speaks at the Google AI@ event on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2022, in New York. Google has been cautious about who gets to play with its AI advancements despite growing pressure for the internet giant to compete more aggressively with rival Microsoft. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)
NEW YORK (AP) -- 

Before the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT was unleashed into the world, the novelist Robin Sloan was testing a similar AI writing assistant built by researchers at Google.

It didn't take long for Sloan, author of the bestseller "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore," to realize that the technology was of little use to him.

"A lot of the state-of-the-art AI right now is impressive enough to really raise your expectations and make you think, 'Wow, I'm dealing with something really, really capable,'" Sloan said. "But then in a thousand little ways, a million little ways, it ends up kind of disappointing you and betraying the fact that it really has no idea what's going on."

Another company might have released the experiment into the wild anyway, as the startup OpenAI did with its ChatGPT tool late last year. But Google has been more cautious about who gets to play with its AI advancements despite growing pressure for the internet giant to compete more aggressively with rival Microsoft, which is pouring billions of dollars into OpenAI and fusing its technology into Microsoft products.

That pressure is starting to take a toll, as Google has asked one of its AI teams to "prioritize working on a response to ChatGPT," according to an internal memo reported this week by CNBC. Google declined to confirm if there was a public chatbot in the works but spokesperson Lily Lin said it continues "to test our AI technology internally to make sure it's helpful and safe, and we look forward to sharing more experiences externally soon."

Some of the technological breakthroughs driving the red-hot field of generative AI — which can churn out paragraphs of readable text and new images as well as music and video — have been pioneered in Google's vast research arm.

"So we have an important stake in this area, but we also have an important stake in not just leading in being able to generate things, but also in dealing with information quality," said Zoubin Ghahramani, vice president of research at Google, in a November interview with The Associated Press.

Ghahramani said the company wants to also be measured about what it releases, and how: "Do we want to make it accessible in a way that people can produce stuff en masse without any controls? The answer to that is no, not at this stage. I don't think it would be responsible for us to be the people driving that."

And they weren't. Four weeks after the AP interview, OpenAI released its ChatGPT for free to anyone with an internet connection. Millions of people around the world have now tried it, sparking searing discussions at schools and corporate offices about the future of education and work.

OpenAI declined to comment on comparisons with Google. But in announcing their extended partnership in January, Microsoft and OpenAI said they are committed to building "AI systems and products that are trustworthy and safe."

As a literary assistant, neither ChatGPT nor Google's creative writing version comes close to what a human can do, Sloan said.

A fictionalized Google was central to the plot of Sloan's popular 2012 novel about a mysterious San Francisco bookstore. That's likely one reason the company invited him along with several other authors to test its experimental Wordcraft Writers Workshop, derived from a powerful AI system known as LaMDA.

Like other language-learning models, including the GPT line built by OpenAI, Google's LaMDA can generate convincing passages of text and converse with humans based on what it's processed from a trove of online writings and digitized books. Facebook parent Meta and Amazon have also built their own big models, which can improve voice assistants like Alexa, predict the next sentence of an email or translate languages in real time.

When it first announced its LaMDA model in 2021, Google emphasized its versatility but also raised the risks of harmful misuse and the possibility it could mimic and amplify biased, hateful or misleading information.

Some of the Wordcraft writers found it useful as a research tool — like a faster and more decisive version of a Google search — as they asked for a list of "rabbit breeds and their magical qualities" or "a verb for the thing fireflies do" or to "Tell me about Venice in 1700," according to Google's paper on the project. But it was less effective as a writer or rewriter, turning out boring sentences riddled with clichés and showing some gender bias.

"I believe them — that they're being thoughtful and cautious," Sloan said of Google. "It's just not the model of a reckless technologist who is in a hurry to get this out into the world no matter what."

Google's development of these models hasn't been without internal acrimony. First, it ousted some prominent researchers who were examining the risks of the technology. And last year, it fired an engineer who publicly posted a conversation with LaMDA in which the model falsely claimed it had human-like consciousness, with a "range of both feelings and emotions."

While ChatGPT and its competitors might never produce acclaimed works of literature, the expectation is they will soon begin to transform other professional tasks — from helping to debug computer code to composing marketing pitches and speeding up the production of a slide presentation.

That's key to why Microsoft, as a seller of workplace software, is eager to enhance its suite of products with the latest OpenAI tools. The benefits are less clear to Google, which largely depends on the advertising dollars it gets when people search for information online.

"If you ask the question and get the wrong answer, it's not great for a search engine," said Dexter Thillien, a technology analyst for the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit.

Microsoft also has a search engine — Bing — but ChatGPT's answers are too inaccurate and outdated, and the cost to run its queries too expensive, for the technology to pose a serious risk to Google's dominant search business, Thillien said.

Google has said that its earlier large language model, named BERT, is already playing a role in answering online searches. Such models can help generate the fact boxes that increasingly appear next to Google's ranked list of web links.

Asked in November about the hype around AI applications such as OpenAI's image-generator DALL-E, Ghahramani acknowledged, in a playful tone, that "it's a little bit annoying sometimes because we know that we have developed a lot of these technologies."

"We're not in this to get the 'likes' and the clicks, right?" he said, noting that Google has been a leader in publishing AI research that others can build upon.

  • Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2023
Samsung's profit plummets amid global economic woes
Employees walk past a logo of the Samsung Electronics Co. at its office in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2023. Samsung Electronics said Tuesday its profit for the last quarter plummeted nearly 70% as a weak global economy depressed demands for its consumer electronics products and computer memory chips. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- 

Samsung Electronics said Tuesday its profit for the last quarter plummeted nearly 70% as a weak global economy depressed demand for its consumer electronics products and computer memory chips.

The company's operating profit of 4.3 trillion won ($3.5 billion) for the three months through December fell 69% from a year earlier, representing its lowest quarterly profit since the third quarter of 2014. Revenue fell 8% to 70.46 trillion won ($57.2 billion).

The South Korean tech giant thrived through the first two years of the pandemic thanks to its dual strengths in parts and finished products, benefiting from robust demand for PCs, TVs and chips powering computer servers as the virus forced millions to work at home.

But it has been harder for the company to weather the economic shock unleashed by Russia's war on Ukraine, which disrupted industrial supply chains and left major economies grappling with higher inflation and slower growth.

"The business environment deteriorated significantly in the fourth quarter due to weak demand amid a global economic slowdown," Samsung said in a statement.

The company's profit from its bread-and-butter semiconductor business came to 270 billion won ($219 million) for the last quarter, down significantly from the 8.83 trillion won ($7.1 billion) it got a year earlier.

Samsung said chip prices fell sharply amid weakened demand as clients adjusted their inventories in face of "deepening uncertainties" in the global economy, a problem the company says will likely extend into the first quarter of 2023.

Samsung also expects demand for its smartphones and TVs to fall further in the first quarter amid the global economic downturn.

Samsung's share price fell 3.5% on Tuesday.

  • Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2023
CoreWeave acquires Conductor Technologies
ROSELAND, NJ -- 

CoreWeave, a specialized cloud provider built for large-scale GPU-accelerated workloads, has acquired Conductor Technologies, developer of the Conductor cloud-based task management service that simplifies access to cloud resources at scale. 

The Conductor service will enable CoreWeave to expand its offering to deliver burst rendering solutions to visual effects studios while removing friction in the setup process. Bolstering existing functionality, Conductor customers will additionally be able to leverage CoreWeave’s solutions, including access to the broadest range of NVIDIA GPUs available on the market, as well as unmatched access to scale, the ability to burst on-demand, and responsive autoscaling out-of-the-box. 

“Demand for cloud-based GPU resources to render VFX and animation projects has skyrocketed, while persistent supply chain challenges have hampered access to compute. CoreWeave offers the specialized resources that our customers rely on at scale, expanding options for studios and artists to render work quickly and efficiently,” said Conductor CEO Mac Moore. “Until now, we’ve focused our development on easing pain points specifically in content production with the artist in mind and are excited to extend Conductor’s functionality to also benefit CoreWeave customers across high performance compute workloads, including AI and ML.” 

Effective January 1, all Conductor Technologies employees have been integrated into the CoreWeave ecosystem, bringing CoreWeave’s total headcount to 95. Moore is now head of the Media and Entertainment division at CoreWeave under the purview of CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator.

CoreWeave already helps modernize VFX and rendering workflows as one of its core offerings--providing flexible on-demand artist workstations, virtually unlimited rendering capacity, and network-attached storage. Customers can tap into NVIDIA GPUs and CPUs that are highly optimized for rendering, on-demand and at scale. Modular solutions across the VFX pipeline provide flexibility, scalability and an intuitive path to migrating to the cloud. 

“You’d be hard-pressed to find a more effective path to accessing cloud-based resources than Conductor. With intuitive orchestration across diverse compute options and application license management, it removes the headaches associated with spinning up cloud resources. We’re thrilled to bring the Conductor team and development resources under the CoreWeave banner as we collaborate with the shared goal to help shape the future of cloud-based technology,” noted Intrator.  

  • Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2023
Cintel Scanner G3 HDR+ hits the market
Cintel Scanner G3 HDR+
FREMONT, Calif. -- 

Blackmagic Design has rolled out the all new Cintel Scanner G3 HDR+, which features a completely redesigned light source that allows real time HDR film scanning in Ultra HD. Demonstrated earlier this year at NAB 2022 in Las Vegas, the new high intensity LED grid array light source allows customers to get even better quality images from scanned film at much higher film scanning speeds.

The new Cintel Scanner G3 HDR+ is available immediately from Blackmagic Design resellers worldwide for $32,045. The new model also retains features of the Cintel Scanners, such as digital servos, gentle capstan drives, advanced color science, 35mm and 16mm film support and an elegant architectural design that can even be wall mounted. The Cintel Scanner can be deployed for unlocking vast archive film libraries for conversion into new Ultra HD masters so they can be uploaded for streaming and online distribution!

The new high intensity light source in Cintel Scanner G3 HDR+ is now six times more powerful. The RGB LED grid array illumination source has a square array of 576 high power LEDs arranged into a grid pattern, which are focused onto film using a new light cylinder. This design means that more than twice the silicon area for generating light is available, resulting in more light being directed at the film. There are tens of kilowatts of power contained in each illumination flash to scan a single frame of film. HDR scanning speed is also now up to three times faster at full real time speed of 30 frames per second in Ultra HD. The Cintel Scanner G3 HDR+ also features improved color science and up to an additional 3.5 stops of HDR range.

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